Song Of The Day 6/3/2015: Teddy & His Patches – “Suzy Creamcheese”


Nuggets Week: Oh, San Francisco. The nexus of '60s counter-culture; the vibrant pustule bursting forth with free thought and cheap hallucinogens. Or do I have that reversed? If anything was happening during the era when Nuggets music was being created, it was in the Bay Area, where binary deductions were discouraged and sexual liberty was for everybody, as long as they were men. Breathtaking vistas and a couple of kick-ass bridges set the scene for dramatic ascots, bejeweled and beaded spiritual ushers, pay-as-you-go philosophical awakenings and things presented by Bill Graham. Hippies, shamans, mystics, bakers and their offshoots had a lot of staying power in San Francisco: Their eternal search for higher consciousness went on for a long time, until they were all run over by a Google Bus full of 26-year-old senior vice presidents racing to a dinner party featuring Fruity Pebbles as haute cuisine.

Teddy & His Patches were from San Jose, and they didn't truck in the whole drug thing that was sweeping the big town at the time. You would never know that from their untamed single "Suzy Creamcheese," which topped radio charts in the South Bay. Nice work, Milpitas! The originators of "Suzy Creamcheese" were actually Frank Zappa and the Mothers, who incidentally used their album We're Only In It For the Money as a direct broadside to the whole San Francisco scene. A healthy debate rampages as to whether Suzy was a strictly fictional creation. Some say the original Suzy was named Suzy Zeiger, who latched onto Zappa's gang in the early '60s, then took off for more exploits in England. Zappa insisted that he came up with the persona of a versatile, allegedly underage groupie while having a little creative outburst in Hawaii. The legend of Suzy became so ingrained that Zappa, as was his wont, tantalized his fans by including her as a character in his traveling coterie on stage and on record. She was played by at least three different women, named Jeannie Vassoir, Lisa Cohen and Pamela Zarubica, depending on the situation. 

Teddy & His Patches in fact paraphrase the spoken opening of Zappa's "The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet" for today's song. I'm proud to report this song sheds no new light on the whole mythology either.

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